The Amazon river is a very large stream of water.  Did it emerge fully formed?  No.  It was created one drop of rain and one flake of snow at a time.

There are far more than roughly two hundred million domain names registered.

Many of those are registered to individual or to small businesses (that are essentially the commercial extension of an individual or small group of individuals.)

Perhaps some eyes will say "$25/name/year is negligible."  That same person ought to say that those drops of rain and flakes of snow that create the Amazon river are also negligible.  However, the sum is immense.  And, for those areas in the rain shadow of the mountains, the absence of those raindrops and snowflakes also has enormous consequences.  Most of us see that grand river; relatively few of us notice the deserts that would bloom had those raindrops and snowflakes not been taken into the river.

Same with ICANN's policies - we tend to forget that those policies are pulling economic raindrops out many pockets, promoting a kind of economic desertification of the wallets of users of the internet.

I know people in the US who find $25 to be the difference between eating and not eating at the end of the month.  How much more significant might that $25 cost be to the 95% of the world's population who do not live in the US?

And to think that business do not pass costs onto consumers - such as individual internet users - would be a flight of fancy.

For companies, whether large or small, the impact of domain name costs may be small, but those costs are there in the financial calculations.  And like those drops of rain and flakes of snow they accumulate and eventually business will raise their product prices - raises that will land, often only indirectly, onto individual users of the internet.

Penny by penny, dollar by dollar, Euro by Euro, ICANN's allowance of unaudited and unquestioned registration fees adds up to well beyond a $Billion each year.  And much of that comes, directly and indirectly, year after year, from the pockets of individual internet users.

One might say "the only ones affected are those individuals who acquire domain names".  Not really.  An individual who had to pay $25 for a domain name for which the underlying cost is a few cents is paying at least $24 too much.  That user has $24 less disposable income to spend into the economy.  Small businesses will add that $25 to their expense ledgers and eventually that will induce, sooner or later, consideration by those businesses whether to raise their product prices.

(By-the-way, the cost I am most concerned about is at the registry layer - registrars tend to have higher, and real, costs for the customer facing systems and other services they provide in order to compete.)

What appear to be small costs on an individual can aggregate into great revenue streams.

Being human, our eyes and attention tend to focus on those great revenue streams.

But the impact at the source end - where the the monetary numbers are small (but the numbers of people paying is large) also deserves attention

One can argue that ICANN and its bodies formed of individuals ought not to worry about what are probably the better part of a $Billion being yanked out of the pockets of individuals.  But I am concerned about cumulative impacts and I would, and I do, wonder why such huge sums are being pulled from individuals.

In other words, I am less concerned about the money river that flows, by grace of ICANN policies, into the pockets of registries.  And I am more concerned about the desertification of personal, family, and small business economics as their money-droplets are drained away into that river.

How can ICANN remedy this?

Well, one can begin with the policy that was yanked out of thin air with no justification and no explanation when ICANN was formed - which is the policy that domain names be registered in one year increments with a maximum of ten years.  (Yes, some registries have loosened this, but the model of yearly rent tends to hold sway.)

(If ICANN were ever to audit the cost of providing name registration servers it is my strong belief that the largest component of the cost will be the machinery to maintain that yearly clock.  (It is also a burden to registrants who have to remember to renew, update credit cards in case auto-renew is enabled, etc - those may seem trivial to those who haven't had to run a small business or be the tech person for a church or school, but I can say from my own companies, that because the costs of making mistakes or missing renewal deadlines can be large, these are rather expensive things to monitor.)

Changing this would be hard for ICANN.  Moving away from the year-based rental approach be a big, often uncomfortable, mental shift for many ICANN folks, and especially for registry/registrar folks.

But it is most definitely a topic that ought to be front and center for any body within ICANN that purports to represent the voice of individual people.

        --karl--

On Fri, Jun 5, 2026 at 4:07 PM Karl Auerbach via At-Large <at-large@icann.org> wrote:

 

The domain name registration system is a money pump that is a pipeline from the pockets of internet users into the bank accounts of domain name registries/registrars and ICANN.  A product for which the actual costs  are a few cents per year, at most, are costing users on th eorder of  1000x that cost.  Overall, ICANN is costing internet users $billions per  year.

No.

It is costing registrants whatever per year.

As a share of marketing expenses (let alone total expenses) domain rental is miniscule. "Sorry, we had to raise our retail price because the cost of our Internet domain increased,"  said nobody, ever.